Mr. Moderator

Mr. Moderator

When not blogging Mr. Moderator enjoys baseball, cooking, and falconry.

Take Rock Town Hall’s What Townsperson Are You? Quiz

 Posted by
Mar 252009
 

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I know that some of you have been dedicating your time-wasting efforts to Facebook. That’s cool. I have also been making some time to help this social networking site jump the shark. Everybody needs the chance to rub virtual elbows with “friends” you otherwise wouldn’t have made the effort to stay in touch with, as proven by the fact that before Facebook you had not been in touch with them for the past 5 to 10 years.

I know, too, that there’s a desire to allow various “apps” into our web-interactive lives to enable us to share personal details with friends, such as our 5 Movies That Shaped My Breakfast Choice This Morning and our 5 Movies That We Thought About While Taking a Dump Later in the Afternoon. Some of the apps are pretty cool, allowing us to easily embed album cover or DVD box images into our lists. It’s not so easy to do things like that in the Halls of Rock, and beside, Mr. DogModic himself frowns on the posting of too many lists without supporting thoughts. He thinks we can do more than that. He thinks we should provide each other opportunities for disagreements, tangents, and the like. Shoot, this place doesn’t even allow us the option of clicking on a little “thumb’s up” icon. WTF?!?!

Do not despair: I hear you, Facebook-inquisitive Townspeople! As focused and unwavering as you may think I am in encouraging us to meet the objectives of Rock Town Hall, I’m a bigger and baser man than that. I don’t want you wasting your hard-earned blow-off time on other sites when you could be here, not only rubbing virtual elbows with knowledgeable, interesting, humorous rock nerds but skinning virtual knees and elbows as you dive for the loose balls of rock criticism! In this bigger and baser spirit, I offer you Rock Town Hall’s first quiz, the What Townsperson Are You? quiz. Our apps are not yet as advanced as those you might have found so engaging on Facebook, but answer the following questions and within 24 hours of your submission our specially devised Rock Town Hall apps will spit out the answer you’ve been secretly dying to know!
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Kid About It

 Posted by
Mar 232009
 


As many of you know, I’m a big fan of Elvis Costello & The Attractions. As much as I love the guy’s music (mostly that done with The Attractions but some other stuff as well), he’s not an artist whose lyrics often mean a lot to me. I usually think they’re cool and find a couple of key couplets to latch onto for meaning, guidance, and inspiration, but he’s not the sort that I’d quote in my high school yearbook, if I could go back in time, as I might any number of lyrics by Paul Weller or Graham Parker, to cite two contemporaries whose music I like a lot but otherwise find not as rich as Costello’s.

One Costello lyric that might be the exception, that might be the one I would have used in my high school yearbook had I been able to make my selection when I was about 30 years old, when I had a better idea of what life was meaning to me, is from Imperial Bedroom‘s “Kid About It”:

So what if this is a man’s world
I want to be a kid again about it
Give me back my sadness
I couldn’t hide it even if I tried girl

I had some rough emotional patches over the weekend – nothing horrible, nothing earth shattering, but the kind of stuff that puts me in touch with the kid in me. I don’t know about you, but as I’ve aged and matured, some feelings that used to be on the surface and readily available with associated artists/albums that spoke to those emotions have become less prevalent over time. As a result, I spin those records less often than I once did, despite still loving the music as much as I ever did. The first two dB’s album mean less to me on a day-to-day basis these days, but this morning, hearing “Ask for Jill” pop up on my iPod, I was able to tap into what the band meant to me every day of my life in my early 20s. I’ve been listening to those first two albums since and enjoying revisiting those vague, hopeful, fragile feelings that the older, wiser, sometimes too-fucking-real me of today doesn’t feel as strongly as he once did.

Do you ever have experiences along these lines with your maturing emotions and aging record collection?

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All-Star Jam

 Posted by
Mar 212009
 


Courtesy of Townsman dbuskirk.

Who’s working hard, who’s hardly working? There’s no question regarding this performance by The Peddlers. Like they’ve done with this kinetic cover, put your own thing into Rock Town Hall through this All-Star Jam!

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The Single Song That Marked All That Could Possibly Suck in the Second Half of the ’70s

 Posted by
Mar 202009
 


Last night I watched two DVDs of Midnight Special performances with Townsman Sethro. We skipped some performances, like Seals and Crofts, and concentrated on rocking artists that might provide insights into cool drum fills and rock faces. Along with the Edgar Winter Band performance that Townspeople are currently analyzing, highlights for discussion included Linda Rondstadt doing “You’re No Good,” which we’ve discussed previously in the Halls of Rock; The Guess Who struggling mightily to perform “American Woman,” the custom-made lucite drums of Billy Preston’s drummer; a busty Marc Bolan and T.Rex, all coked out of their minds; and a smokin’ hot Debbie Harry and Clem Burke with Blondie, the two of them providing all the heavy lifting in that band, as was always the case.

Some day we may have to analyze the Guess Who performance separately. Both Burton Cummings and the porn soloing faces of the lead guitarist are rich in talking points.

But that’s not the moment you’ve been waiting for; that’s not the single song that marked all that could possibly suck in the second half of the ’70s.

As we scrolled through the menu on these DVDs, I suggested we skip the following band, but Sethro thought there might be something there. There surely was something there.

Before we view this stunning clip, you might recall Townsman cdm’s recent thoughts on Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein”:

The 70’s are a contender for the most interesting decade in rock in my book, but that song is a catalog of everything bad about 70s rock. (pop-prog leanings, cheesy synths, self-indulgence manifesting itself in a very uninteresting way, songs that go on too long, albinos, etc)

As I said to him, he makes a lot of sense, but I thought there was one song that – short of albinoism – covered all that cdm mentioned and then some, failing to deliver in any way on just about any of the “leanings” and indulgences he outlined. I would argue that this is the heart of darkness moment foreshadowing the worst of ’70s rock:
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I Want to Tell You

 Posted by
Mar 192009
 

I want to tell you about…

Today I’d like to try launching an occasional round-robin feature that will require a tiny bit more structure on our part than our occasional “Now Playing” threads. I’m going to call it I Want to Tell You. Pretend, if you must, that these threads will be archived and that educators will be able to receive materials for using these posts as a classroom tool. I’m writing this in the hushed-yet-slightly-awed voice of a Public Radio personality…

Heron, “Take Me Back Home”

Heron, “Minstrel and a King”

Using a simple format, I’d like to encourage Townspeople tell all about a newly discovered (be it new or old) band, record, or song that you find has – once more, maybe even miraculously – revived your love for music. It works like this:
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